CW/TW: Sexual assault, attempted murder
As we mentioned in our episode on THE NICE GUYS, one of the best lines in the entire film occurs near the end, when a thirteen year old girl is desperate to stop an act of violence. Holly, March’s (Ryan Gosling) tweenage daughter played by a young Angourie Rice (who also has a central role in MARE OF EASTTOWN), shrieks at Russell Crowe’s Healy as he pummels an unconscious assassin named John Boy (Matt Bomer) nearly to death with his own two fists: “Mr. Healy, if you kill this man, I’ll never speak to you again!”
It’s a beautiful line from a little girl, who only has so much ammo to throw at someone whose job it is to hurt people for a living. She knows she has very little with which to threaten a man who now means so much to her– she can’t hit him, she wouldn’t shoot him, she can’t withhold pay for a job she has hired him to do. All she can do, truly, is hope that limiting his access to her would, in some capacity, cast a shadow on his future days. And to both characters’ credit, her gamble was correct. Healy stops punching John Boy, and tells him his life was just saved by Holly, a child he had previously tried to kill during a very sexual-assault-coded home invasion sequence.
Also in the past few days, I raced through AmazonPrime’s newest hit series NEAGLEY (2026), a spinoff of Lee Child’s REACHER adaptation. The season, starring Danish writer/actress Maria Sten as the titular Frances Neagley, is a quality Private Investigator origin story with plenty of automatic weapons and fistfights thrown into the milieu. With more high-octane violence than HBO’s Perry Mason, Amazon’s Spider-Noir, and certainly more than Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, it’s a bit difficult to sniff out the foundations of a Sam Spade-type narrative in there, but it hits all the required notes.
Private Investigators operate on the White Knight literary framework.
Presented as a loner bordering on an inhuman enigma, the literary private detective generally works alone or only supported by a small group of underlings/squires. They have an unimpeachable moral code, they fight for honor and righteousness that they usually define for themselves, and often keep quite hidden. Even when they “win” against a foe, the white knights are frequently injured or set back in a way that other people with lesser morals would consider insurmountable (ever notice that Marlowe and Spade never seem to make any money?).
Another aspect of White Knighthood is an aloofness– often even virginity, in the case of the greatest Round Table knight, Galahad– and an untouchability that the knight will not be taken down by “earthy” issues (there’s a reason why Gawain takes on a Green Knight in his most famous iteration– the Green Knight isn’t evil like a Black Knight, but he sure as hell is “earthy”). Spade and Marlowe are taken in by femmes fatales more often than not, their greatest weaknesses being their “earthy” desire to get close to a woman they know has worse morals than they do. In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid O’Shaughnessy– a Celtic name if I e’er heard one, to harken back to King Arthur tales from the British Isles– has more Morgan Le Fay about her than almost any other woman in modern detective fiction. When a Private Investigator/White Knight lets a woman see him for “who he truly is,” she will likely stab him– in the back or front.
Now, how to balance an untouchability when your Private Investigator is embodied by a Black woman, a person over whose body most people have been conditioned to feel ownership?
Most people would say that Neagley “suffers” from haphephobia, a condition where a person wishes for no physical contact with others. But Neagley herself approaches her aversion to physical touch as something more of a rule to abide by, rather than something that needs to be fixed to be “normal.” Her virginity– which she stops just short of admitting to her dying father– has weighed on her, but almost subconsciously, something to get to when the time is right or when she has the stability to tackle the palisades she has built around her body.
In addition to the fantasy that even when shooting AR-15s our heroes never seem to catch a bullet in their fleshy parts, Neagley has, miraculously, somehow always been in the proximity of men who understand her and don’t want to forcefully break down the barrier of her “no.” Her love interest, Riley (Greyston Holt), at least has the awareness to know she could kill him with a flick of her wrist if he ever tried anything. And Reacher? Well, he’s not exactly opposed to sex, but it’s well established that a woman has to give a veritable fireworks display of consent before he even gets the clue she’s interested. Neagley never gave him that, so Reacher never considered it.
NEAGLEY works an interesting new angle on “access” to a beautiful Woman of Color– and her power.
Years ago, I wrote a piece for Crime Reads about the unspoken criminality of having a female Private Investigator character. In America, the rise of Private Investigator fiction in the inter-war period into the crisis of World War II has colored our perspective on who can, and who should, be a White Knight. In her essay “The Female Dick and the Crisis of Heterosexuality,” Ann Wilson wrote “The female private investigator poses a threat to male police officers. Their heterosexual manhood is threatened by the mere existence of the female dick.”
In some way, this has clear ramifications on THE NICE GUYS and NEAGLEY– both female characters us “access” to them to, in some way, urge a male character to do what she wants. Holly, a relatively powerless 13 year old, has had a crash course in what “access” means in a 1970s world awash with drugs and rape, still maintains an innocence with Healy, who blessedly never leers at the little girl and who keenly understands that the loss she is grappling with– the death of her mother– pales in comparison to his loss of his wife.
Though the sizzle between Neagley and Riley is barely palpable by modern romance standards, Riley makes it very clear that he is not at all neutered by the existence of this female private dick in his midst. It’s a pretty good class in writing consent, and a healthy understanding of boundaries for a cop who had no compunction about putting more than a few people into early graves. Neagley doesn’t apologize for her boundary, she asserts and re-asserts it as needed, and then when she is aware she would like it adjusted, communicates that to the man she would be okay with adjusting it to include. He receives the information, tells her he is happy to hear it, and then leaves the power in her more than capable hands.
In essence, both Holly and Neagley are given rare levels of autonomy for female characters in P.I. narratives by being allowed to draw hard-and-fast boundaries around who has access to them. Not just their bodies, but their associations. In a genre where “being known” is a professional setback, they make it clear that to know them is a privilege. And surprisingly, the men in their life handle that privilege with grace.
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